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If I want to read AI generated text, I do not need to go to the motte, I can simply prompt Claude. For about 22 dollars a month, I could generate not only more text than the motte produces than what I am capable of reading.
By contrast, human-generated text has at least opportunity costs. If we simple allow LLM textposting then approximately 99% of the text on this site would be LLM-generated in equilibrium.
I will grant you that it is entirely possible that some of the commentators here are mostly bots. But even so, the anti-bot rules will severely constrain their behavior. They can not simply post a few megabytes worth of text per day over hundreds or thousands of comments because that would be a clear tell.
Furthermore, from what I read, authorship aside, this is not a QC post, to put it mildly. Too long, little meat. How does it relate to the CW? No particularly new or divisive thesis.
Five years ago, it would have been tolerated because there would have been no hazard to letting it stand, people rambling about the origin of sheriffs were not generally a menace in the internet.
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Unrelatedly, a new user account created hours after a ban, commenting first and foremost on the ban decision has certainly a bit of a taste for me. But then, I am sure that no commentators here would ever stoop to creating alt accounts, so welcome to the motte I guess.
A question I've had for a while is that, well, given that LLM text written for humans is so uniformly bad, why do we expect anything else it produces to be worthwhile?
The Motte is a relatively pro-tech space. I expect people here to be more sympathetic to LLMs than the median person. The Motte is, after all, several steps removed a spin-off from SSC and Less Wrong before that, both sources that have swallowed LLM/AI technology pretty enthusiastically. Nonetheless here, when it comes to posting, there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that LLM-posting is bad, and the text that they produce is worthless slop.
Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots? If you read text from an LLM, it's garbage. If you talk to an LLM for an hour, the overwhelming impression you'll come away with is how dumb and uninteresting they are. This is supposed to be the rapidly-improving super-intelligence that will obsolete us? Really?
I mean, yeah. It does. My personal experiences with LLMs (both at work doing programming and reading people's LLM-generated essays) have been profoundly unsatisfying. Therefore, I have extremely low expectations for them doing anything else well. But I think the people you see hyping up LLMs are not meeting your first criterion. For example, self_made_human has been pretty consistent in his opinions that he finds LLMs to be impressive at all the various tasks he sets to them, including writing. So it makes perfect sense that he is upbeat about their prospects in other areas. And I think the same goes for our other posters who are LLM fans - they find the models to be super impressive and therefore think they will continue to impress in the future.
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Because the reason the Motte is pro-tech has a lot to do with the average occupation of its users, and that occupation is what the average LLM company has been actively targeting for replacement.
It's not that much more complex than that.
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LMOA, and his latest comment is even more on the nose:
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